J Neuropsychiatry Clin Neurosci 1991; 3:84-88
Copyright © 1991 by American Neuropsychiatric Association
Neuropsychiatric decision making: the role of disorder prevalence in diagnostic testing
D Mossman and E Somoza
Psychiatry Service, Department of Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Cincinnati, OH 45220, USA.
Although the performance of medical diagnostic tests is usually described
in terms of their sensitivity and specificity, these accuracy indices by
themselves are of little help to clinicians who need to make decisions
about patient care. Estimating the probability that a patient with a
positive or negative test has or lacks a disorder requires the clinician to
include the pretest probability of the disorder in the interpretation of
the test result. This article described several approaches to the problem
of interpreting diagnostic data in actual clinical contexts.
